A 50-Year Collection of Hiroshige Prints Is Heading to Christie’s
The “Hiroshige: Colors of the Four Seasons | The Alan Medaugh Collection” sale is an early highlight of the upcoming fall auction season
One of the most important collections of Japanese prints will be up for auction next month when Christie’s offers “Hiroshige: Colors of the Four Seasons | The Alan Medaugh Collection”. The remarkable group of prints was assembled by Medaugh over half a century and includes 181 works by Edo-era printmaker Utagawa Hiroshige, best known for his landscape woodblock prints.
A comprehensive slice of Hiroshige is on offer here. The Christie’s sale is interesting because this is not just a particular group of Hiroshige. It contains an entire set of his great late-career series, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
“We are deeply honored to offer this one-of-a-kind collection of Hiroshige woodblock prints this season, painstakingly assembled by Mr. Medaugh over the course of 50 years,” says Takaaki Murakami, Christie’s Head of Department for Japanese and Korean Art. “The result of his collecting prowess is clear, and we are delighted to present this rare and remarkable selection of vibrant offerings of the finest quality to our clients this fall during Asian Art Week in New York.”
The sale will take place on September 15 at 10 a.m. The prints themselves will be on view to the public September 11–14 at Christie’s Rockefeller Center headquarters in New York.
The top price paid for a Japanese print at auction was approximately $2.79 million for Hokusai’s Under the Wave off Kanagawa at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in November of 2025. The record for a single print by Hiroshige is around $395,000, which was the price paid at Sotheby’s London in 2022 for Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake, which once belonged to Freddie Mercury. The peak for the artist overall was $2.45 million for an entire series, Famous Places in the Sixty-odd Provinces, which sold at Sotheby’s Paris in 2025.
While estimates on the prints listed for preview currently top out in the low six figures, a significant multiple would be unsurprising. Asian Art Week auctions in New York, which the Medaugh sale is part of, are frequently a draw for bidders from abroad and generate lively bidding.
